Once again I've been remiss on updating my journal. But for good reason and I'll go into it a little bit here for those who might have been worried about me.

Well to put it briefly, life sucks. Deb has been into the Emergency room five times in the last few weeks with shortness of breath and chest pains, four of those times by ambulance. Once she nearly died from lack of oxygen and CPR and an epinephrine shot were the only things that saved her. She has had every test known to man done and the best they can come up with is Mitral Valve Prolapse. She is now on medical disability from work. She has no energy and when she exerts herself even a little, she blacks out. Friday I got home to find her extremely low on energy with severe chest pains and fainting. So I rushed her down to the emergency room where we stayed for the next 6 hours until they finally admitted her. She even passed out on the way into the Emergency Room and it was good i had a hand on her at the time and a tech was handy with a wheelchair. She's been in the hospital since Friday night. Her blood pressure was like, dead person low. Something like 80/56 and her electrolytes were all screwed up so they had her on a saline IV all weekend and her BP was finally 122/83 this morning. She's had blood drawn every six hours so now she's really hating needles and it's hard for the nurses to even find a place to draw from in her arms. She may be released today...or not depending in the results of an echocardiogram she had done and we will just have to see from there. Frankly I'm getting a little fed up with doctors as of late though I know they are doing their jobs but each one seems to be taking a shot in the dark and prescribing drugs for what they think it might be and then the next ones takes her off that drug and calls the last guy a quack and puts her on something new.

And I can't do much to treat her if I don't know what is wrong other than to just give her overall healing energy.

We did like her attending physician over the weekend. He seemed to give us some straight answers on things. He was pissed that her regular doctor had not waited for the results of her echocardiogram before prescribing this calcium line blocker he put her on because in addition to being a treatment for MVP, it is also a treatment for High blood pressure. It is meant to bring your blood pressure down and she was already at the low end of the normal scale anyway, and with the sudden weight loss from the allergy medications she was on and asthma medications as well, the cumulative effect was lowering her blood pressure to the point she could barely get off the couch without blacking out and was having several episodes of severe chest pains each day.

So she has not had a chest pain episode since Saturday and has not passed out. Of course she's also had no exercise other than getting out of bed to pee.

I got about 6 hours of sleep all weekend as I was by her side most of the time. At tleast it gave me some time to read but it was big time hurry up and wait which is frustrating to say the least. for part of the time she had a private room because she didn't have another patient for a roommate. I think she rested well then but the first night with the woman on the otehr side of the hall screaming for a bed pan every five minutes (no lie) was a bit stressful. Her roomamte that night was a heart patient as well and quiet as a mouse. Then a full day of no rooomate and then yesterday morning an elderly diabetic woman was brought in who also had a lung infection and was constantly coughing up phlegm in a loud and disgusting manner. That didn't help Deb get any sleep, nor did the woman's very loud relatives who seemd to have no concept that there was another patient in the room trying to get some sleep.

So if she does come home today, I think we may just eat some dinner and go right to sleep and get as much rest as possible. I told Deb to ask the attending physician if he would take her on as a patient instead of the idiot she has now. Hopefully he will say yes and we can finally get some consistent care for her. If it were not for the fact her insurance carrier is not accepted by the local heart care center, we would have gone there all along and probably have been much better off. Oh well, that has not happened so we will just play it by ear and see where to go from here. Hopefully we will get some answers soon on what is going on and we can get on an aggressive course of treatment for her.